a

r
X
i
v
:
0
9
0
8
.
1
9
6
4
v
3


[
h
e
p
-
t
h
]


2
6

S
e
p

2
0
0
9
UTTG-09-09
TCC-028-09
Eective Field Theory, Past and Future
Steven Weinberg

Theory Group, Department of Physics, University of Texas

Austin, TX, 78712
Abstract
This is a written version of the opening talk at the 6th International Work-
shop on Chiral Dynamics, at the University of Bern, Switzerland, July 6,
2009, to be published in the proceedings of the Workshop. In it, I remi-
nisce about the early development of eective eld theories of the strong
interactions, comment briey on some other applications of eective eld
theories, and then take up the idea that the Standard Model and General
Relativity are the leading terms in an eective eld theory. Finally, I cite
recent calculations that suggest that the eective eld theory of gravitation
and matter is asymptotically safe.

Electronic address: weinberg@physics.utexas.edu

1
I have been asked by the organizers of this meeting to celebrate 30
years of a paper
1
on eective eld theories that I wrote in 1979. I am
quoting this request at the outset, because in the rst half of this talk I will
be reminiscing about my own work on eective eld theories, leading up to
this 1979 paper. I think it is important to understand how confusing these
things seemed back then, and no one knows better than I do how confused I
was. But I am sure that many in this audience know more than I do about
the applications of eective eld theory to the strong interactions since 1979,
so I will mention only some early applications to strong interactions and a
few applications to other areas of physics. I will then describe how we have
come to think that our most fundamental theories, the Standard Model and
General Relativity, are the leading terms in an eective eld theory. Finally,
I will report on recent work of others that lends support to a suggestion that
this eective eld theory may actually be a fundamental theory, valid at all
energies.
It all started with current algebra. As everyone knows, in 1960 Yoichiro
Nambu had the idea that the axial vector current of beta decay could be con-
sidered to be conserved in the same limit that the pion, the lightest hadron,
could be considered massless.
2
This assumption would follow if the ax-
ial vector current was associated with a spontaneously broken approximate
symmetry, with the pion playing the role of a Goldstone boson.
3
Nambu
used this idea to explain the success of the Goldberger-Treiman formula
4
for the pion decay amplitude, and with his collaborators he was able to de-
rive formulas for the rate of emission of a single low energy pion in various
collisions.
5
In this work it was not necessary to assume anything about the
nature of the broken symmetry only that there was some approximate
symmetry responsible for the approximate conservation of the axial vector
current and the approximate masslessness of the pion. But to deal with
processes involving more than one pion, it was necessary to use not only the
approximate conservation of the current but also the current commutation
relations, which of course do depend on the underlying broken symmetry.
1
S. Weinberg, Physica A96, 327 (1979).
2
Y. Nambu, Phys. Rev. Lett. 4, 380 (1960).
3
J. Goldstone, Nuovo Cimento 9, 154 (1961); Y. Nambu and G. Jona-Lasinio, Phys.
Rev. 122, 345 (1961); J. Goldstone, A. Salam, and S. Weinberg, Phys. Rev. 127, 965
(1962).
4
M. L. Goldberger and S. B. Treiman, Phys. Rev. 111, 354 (1956).
5
Y. Nambu and D. Lurie, Phys Rev. 125, 1429 (1962); Y. Nambu and E. Shrauner,
Phys. Rev. 128, 862 (1962).
2
The technology of using these properties of the currents, in which one does
not use any specic Lagrangian for the strong interactions, became known
as current algebra.
6
It scored a dramatic success in the derivation of the
Adler-Weisberger sum rule
7
for the axial vector beta decay coupling con-
stant g
A
, which showed that the current commutation relations are those of
SU(2) SU(2).
When I started in the mid-1960s to work on current algebra, I had the
feeling that, despite the success of the Goldberger-Treiman relation and the
Adler-Weisberger sum rule, there was then rather too much emphasis on the
role that the axial vector current plays in weak interactions. After all, even if
there were no weak interactions, the fact that the strong interactions have an
approximate but spontaneously broken SU(2) SU(2) symmetry would be
a pretty important piece of information about the strong interactions.
8
To
demonstrate the point, I was able to use current algebra to derive successful
formulas for the pion-pion and pion-nucleon scattering lengths.
9
When com-
bined with a well-known dispersion relation
10
and the Goldberger-Treiman
relation, these formulas for the pionnucleon scattering lengths turned out
to imply the Adler-Weisberger sum rule.
In 1966 I turned to the problem of calculating the rate of processes in
which arbitrary numbers of low energy massless pions are emitted in the
collision of other hadrons. This was not a problem that urgently needed
to be solved. I was interested in it because a year earlier I had worked
out simple formulas for the rate of emission of arbitrary numbers of soft
gravitons or photons in any collision,
11
and I was curious whether anything
equally simple could be said about soft pions. Calculating the amplitude
for emission of several soft pions by use of the technique of current algebra
turned out to be fearsomely complicated; the non-vanishing commutators
of the currents associated with the soft pions prevented the derivation of
anything as simple as the results for soft photons or gravitons, except in the
6
The name may be due to Murray Gell-Mann. The current commutation relations
were given in M. Gell-Mann, Physics 1, 63 (1964).
7
S. L. Adler, Phys. Rev. Lett. 14, 1051 (1965); Phys. Rev. 140, B736 (1965); W. I.
Weisberger, Phys. Rev. Lett. 14, 1047 (1965).
8
I emphasized this point in my rapporteurs talk on current algebra at the 1968
Rochester conference; see Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on High-
Energy Physics, p. 253.
9
S. Weinberg, Phys. Rev. Lett. 17, 616 (1966). The pion-nucleon scattering lengths
were calculated independently by Y. Tomozawa, Nuovo Cimento 46A, 707 (1966).
10
M. L. Goldberger, Y. Miyazawa, and R. Oehme, Phys. Rev. 99, 986 (1955).
11
S. Weinberg, Phys. Rev. 140, B516 (1965).
3
special case in which all pions have the same charge.
12
Then some time late in 1966 I was sitting at the counter of a cafe in Har-
vard Square, scribbling on a napkin the amplitudes I had found for emitting
two or three soft pions in nucleon collisions, and it suddenly occurred to
me that these results looked very much like what would be given by lowest
order Feynman diagrams in a quantum eld theory in which pion lines are
emitted from the external nucleon lines, with a Lagrangian in which the
nucleon interacts with one, two, and more pion elds. Why should this be?
Remember, this was a time when theorists had pretty well given up the
idea of applying specic quantum eld theories to the strong interactions,
because there was no reason to trust the lowest order of perturbation the-
ory, and no way to sum the perturbation series. What was popular was to
exploit tools such as current algebra and dispersion relations that did not
rely on assumptions about particular Lagrangians.
The best explanation that I could give then for the eld-theoretic ap-
pearance of the current algebra results was that these results for the emission
of n soft pions in nucleon collisions are of the minimum order, G
n

, in the
pion-nucleon coupling constant G

, except that one had to use the exact

values for the collision amplitudes without soft pion emission, and divide by
factors of the axial vector coupling constant g
A
1.2 in appropriate places.
Therefore any Lagrangian that satised the axioms of current algebra would
have to give the same answer as current algebra in lowest order perturbation
theory, except that it would have to be a eld theory in which soft pions
were emitted only from external lines of the diagram for the nucleon colli-
sions, for only then would one know how to put in the correct factors of g
A
and the correct nucleon collision amplitude.
The time-honored renormalizable theory of nucleons and pions with con-
served currents that satised the assumptions of current algebra was the
linear -model,
13
with Lagrangian (in the limit of exact current conser-
vation):
L =
1
2
[

]
12
S. Weinberg, Phys. Rev. Lett. 16, 879 (1966).
13
J. Bernstein, S. Fubini, M. Gell-Mann, and W. Thirring, Nuovo Cimento 17, 757
(1960); M. Gell-Mann and M. Levy, Nuovo Cimento 16, 705 (1960); K. C. Chou, Soviet
Physics JETP 12, 492 (1961). This theory, with the inclusion of a symmetry-breaking
term proportional to the eld, was intended to provide an illustration of a partially
conserved axial current, that is, one whose divergence is proportional to the pion eld.
4

m
2
2
_

2
+
2
_

4
_

2
+
2
_
2

N G

N
_
+ 2i
5

t
_
N , (1)
where N, , and are the elds of the nucleon doublet, pion triplet, and
a scalar singlet, and

t is the nucleon isospin matrix (with

t
2
= 3/4). This
Lagrangian has an SU(2) SU(2) symmetry (equivalent as far as current
commutation relations are concerned to an SO(4) symmetry), that is spon-
taneously broken for m
2
< 0 by the expectation value of the eld, given
in lowest order by < >= F/2
_
m
2
/, which also gives the nucleon
a lowest order mass 2G

F. But with a Lagrangian of this form soft pions

could be emitted from internal as well as external lines of the graphs for the
nucleon collision itself, and there would be no way to evaluate the pion emis-
sion amplitude without having to sum over the innite number of graphs
for the nucleon collision amplitude.
To get around this obstacle, I used the chiral SO(4) symmetry to rotate
the chiral four-vector into the fourth direction
_
,
_

_
0,

_
,

=
_

2
+
2
, (2)
with a corresponding chiral transformation N N

of the nucleon doublet.

The chiral symmetry of the Lagrangian would result in the pion disappearing
from the Lagrangian, except that the matrix of the rotation (2) necessar-
ily, like the elds, depends on spacetime position, while the theory is only
invariant under spacetime-independent chiral rotations. The pion eld thus
reappears as a parameter in the SO(4) rotation (2), which could conveniently
be taken as

F/[ +

] . (3)
But the rotation parameter

would not appear in the transformed La-

grangian if it were independent of the spacetime coordinates, so wherever it
appears it must be accompanied with at least one derivative. This derivative
produces a factor of pion four-momentum in the pion emission amplitude,
which would suppress the amplitude for emitting soft pions, if this factor
were not compensated by the pole in the nucleon propagator of an external
nucleon line to which the pion emission vertex is attached. Thus, with the
Lagrangian in this form, pions of small momenta can only be emitted from
external lines of a nucleon collision amplitude. This is what I needed.
Since

is chiral-invariant, it plays no role in maintaining the chiral

invariance of the theory, and could therefore be replaced with its lowest-
5
order expectation value F/2. The transformed Lagrangian (now dropping
primes) is then
L =
1
2
_
1 +

2
F
2
_
2

N
_

+G

F/2
+i

_
1 +

2
F
2
_
1 _
2
F

5

+
2
F
2

t (

)
_
_
N . (4)
In order to reproduce the results of current algebra, it is only necessary to
identify F as the pion decay amplitude F

184 MeV, replace the term

G

F/2 in the nucleon bilinear with the actual nucleon mass m

N
(given by
the GoldbergerTreiman relation as G

/2g
A
), and replace the pseudovec-
tor pion-nucleon coupling 1/F with its actual value G

/2m
N
= g
A
/F

. This
gives an eective Lagrangian
L
e
=
1
2
_
1 +

2
F
2

_
2

N
_

+m
N
+i

_
1 +

2
F
2

_
1 _
G

m
N

+
2
F
2

t (

)
_
_
N . (5)
To take account of the nite pion mass, the linear sigma model also includes
a chiral-symmetry breaking perturbation proportional to . Making the
chiral rotation (2), replacing

with the constant F/2, and adjusting the

coecient of this term to give the physical pion mass m

gives a chiral
symmetry breaking term
L
e
=
1
2
_
1 +

2
F
2

_
1
m
2

2
. (6)
Using L
e
+ L
e
in lowest order perturbation theory, I found the same
results for low-energy pion-pion and pion-nucleon scattering that I had ob-
tained earlier with much greater diculty by the methods of current algebra.
A few months after this work, Julian Schwinger remarked to me that it
should be possible to skip this complicated derivation, forget all about the
6
linear -model, and instead infer the structure of the Lagrangian directly
from the non-linear chiral transformation properties of the pion eld appear-
ing in (5).
14
It was a good idea. I spent the summer of 1967 working out
these transformation properties, and what they imply for the structure of
the Lagrangian.
15
It turns out that if we require that the pion eld has the
usual linear transformation under SO(3) isospin rotations (because isospin
symmetry is supposed to be not spontaneously broken), then there is a
unique SO(4) chiral transformation that takes the pion eld into a function
of itself unique, that is, up to possible redenition of the eld. For an
innitesimal SO(4) rotation by an angle in the a4 plane (where a = 1, 2, 3),
the pion eld
b
(labelled with a prime in Eq. (3)) changes by an amount

b
= iF

_
1
2
_
1

2
F
2

ab
+

a

b
F
2

_
. (7)
Any other eld , on which isospin rotations act with a matrix

t , is changed
by an innitesimal chiral rotation in the a4 plane by an amount

a
=

F

t
_
a
. (8)
This is just an ordinary, though position-dependent, isospin rotation, so a
non-derivative isospin-invariant term in the Lagrangian that does not in-
volve pions, like the nucleon mass term m
N

NN, is automatically chiral-
invariant. The terms in Eq. (5):

N
_

+
2i
F
2

_
1 +

2
F
2

_
1

t (

)
_
N , (9)
and
i
G

m
N
_
1 +

2
F
2

_
1

N , (10)
are simply proportional to the most general chiral-invariant nucleonpion
interactions with a single spacetime derivative. The coecient of the term
14
For Schwingers own development of this idea, see J. Schwinger, Phys. Lett. 24B,
473 (1967). It is interesting that in deriving the eective eld theory of goldstinos in
supergravity theories, it is much more transparent to start with a theory with linearly
realized supersymmetry and impose constraints analogous to setting

= F/2, than to
work from the beginning with supersymmetry realized non-linearly, in analogy to Eq. (7);
see Z. Komargodski and N. Seiberg, to be published.
15
S. Weinberg, Phys. Rev. 166, 1568 (1968).
7
(9) is xed by the condition that N should be canonically normalized, while
the coecient of (10) is chosen to agree with the conventional denition
of the pion-nucleon coupling G

, and is not directly constrained by chiral

symmetry. The term

1
2
_
1 +

2
F
2
_
2

(11)
is proportional to the most general chiral invariant quantity involving the
pion eld and no more than two spacetime derivatives, with a coecient
xed by the condition that should be canonically normalized. The chiral
symmetry breaking term (6) is the most general function of the pion eld
without derivatives that transforms as the fourth component of a chiral four-
vector. None of this relies on the methods of current algebra, though one
can use the Lagrangian (5) to calculate the Noether current corresponding
to chiral transformations, and recover the Goldberger-Treiman relation in
the form g
A
= G

/2m
N
.
This sort of direct analysis was subsequently extended by Callan, Cole-
man, Wess, and Zumino to the transformation and interactions of the Gold-
stone boson elds associated with the spontaneous breakdown of any Lie
group G to any subgroup H.
16
Here, too, the transformation of the Gold-
stone boson elds is unique, up to a redenition of the elds, and the trans-
formation of other elds under G is uniquely determined by their trans-
formation under the unbroken subgroup H. It is straightforward to work
out the rules for using these ingredients to construct eective Lagrangians
that are invariant under G as well as H.
17
Once again, the key point is
that the invariance of the Lagrangian under G would eliminate all presence
of the Goldstone boson eld in the Lagrangian if the eld were spacetime-
independent, so wherever functions of this eld appear in the Lagrangian
they are always accompanied with at least one spacetime derivative.
16
S. Coleman, J. Wess, and B. Zumino, Phys. Rev. 177, 2239(1969); C. G. Callan, S.
Coleman, J. Wess, and B. Zumino, Phys. Rev. 177, 2247(1969).
17
There is a complication. In some cases, such as SU(3) SU(3) spontaneously broken
to SU(3), fermion loops produce G-invariant terms in the action that are not the integrals
of G-invariant terms in the Lagrangian density; see J. Wess and B. Zumino, Phys. Lett.
37B, 95 (1971); E. Witten, Nucl. Phys. B223, 422 (1983). The most general such terms in
the action, whether or not produced by fermion loops, have been cataloged by E. DHoker
and S. Weinberg, Phys. Rev. D50, R6050 (1994). It turns out that for SU(N) SU(N)
spontaneously broken to the diagonal SU(N), there is just one such term for N 3, and
none for N = 1 or 2. For N = 3, this term is the one found by Wess and Zumino.
8
In the following years, eective Lagrangians with spontaneously broken
SU(2)SU(2) or SU(3)SU(3) symmetry were widely used in lowest-order
perturbation theory to make predictions about low energy pion and kaon
interactions.
18
But during this period, from the late 1960s to the late 1970s,
like many other particle physicists I was chiey concerned with developing
and testing the Standard Model of elementary particles. As it happened, the
Standard Model did much to clarify the basis for chiral symmetry. Quan-
tum chromodynamics with N light quarks is automatically invariant under
a SU(N) SU(N) chiral symmetry,
19
broken in the Lagrangian only by
quark masses, and the electroweak theory tells us that the currents of this
symmetry (along with the quark number currents) are just those to which
the W

, Z
0
, and photon are coupled.
During this whole period, eective eld theories appeared as only a de-
vice for more easily reproducing the results of current algebra. It was dif-
cult to take them seriously as dynamical theories, because the derivative
couplings that made them useful in the lowest order of perturbation theory
also made them nonrenormalizable, thus apparently closing o the possibil-
ity of using these theories in higher order.
My thinking about this began to change in 1976. I was invited to give a
series of lectures at Erice that summer, and took the opportunity to learn
the theory of critical phenomena by giving lectures about it.
20
In preparing
these lectures, I was struck by Kenneth Wilsons device of integrating out
short-distance degrees of freedom by introducing a variable ultraviolet cut-
o, with the bare couplings given a cuto dependence that guaranteed that
physical quantities are cuto independent. Even if the underlying theory
is renormalizable, once a nite cuto is introduced it becomes necessary to
introduce every possible interaction, renormalizable or not, to keep physics
18
For reviews, see S. Weinberg, in Lectures on Elementary Particles and Quantum Field
Theory 1970 Brandeis University Summer Institute in Theoretical Physics, Vol. 1, ed.
S. Deser, M. Grisaru, and H. Pendleton (The M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1970); B. W.
Lee, Chiral Dynamics (Gordon and Breach, New York, 1972).
19
For a while it was not clear why there was not also a chiral U(1) symmetry, that would
also be broken in the Lagrangian only by the quark masses, and would either lead to a
parity doubling of observed hadrons, or to a new light pseudoscalar neutral meson, both
of which possibilities were experimentally ruled out. It was not until 1976 that t Hooft
pointed out that the eect of triangle anomalies in the presence of instantons produced
an intrinsic violation of this unwanted chiral U(1) symmetry; see G. t Hooft, Phys. Rev.
D14, 3432 (1976).
20
S. Weinberg, Critical Phenomena for Field Theorists, in Understanding the Funda-
mental Constituents of Matter, ed. A. Zichichi (Plenum Press, New York, 1977).
9
strictly cuto independent. From this point of view, it doesnt make much
dierence whether the underlying theory is renormalizable or not. Indeed,
I realized that even without a cuto, as long as every term allowed by sym-
metries is included in the Lagrangian, there will always be a counterterm
available to absorb every possible ultraviolet divergence by renormalization
of the corresponding coupling constant. Non-renormalizable theories, I re-
alized, are just as renormalizable as renormalizable theories.
This opened the door to the consideration of a Lagrangian containing
terms like (5) as the basis for a legitimate dynamical theory, not limited to
the tree approximation, provided one adds every one of the innite number
of other, higher-derivative, terms allowed by chiral symmetry.
21
But for this
to be useful, it is necessary that in some sort of perturbative expansion,
only a nite number of terms in the Lagrangian can appear in each order of
perturbation theory.
In chiral dynamics, this perturbation theory is provided by an expansion
in powers of small momenta and pion masses. At momenta of order m

, the
number of factors of momenta or m

contributed by a diagram with L

loops, E
N
external nucleon lines, and V
i
vertices of type i, for any reaction
among pions and/or nucleons, is
=

i
V
i
_
d
i
+
n
i
2
+m
i
2
_
+ 2L + 2
E
N
2
, (12)
where d
i
, n
i
, and m
i
are respectively the numbers of derivatives, factors of
nucleon elds, and factors of pion mass (or more precisely, half the number
of factors of u and d quark masses) associated with vertices of type i. As a
consequence of chiral symmetry, the minimum possible value of d
i
+n
i
/2+m
i
is 2, so the leading diagrams for small momenta are those with L = 0 and
any number of interactions with d
i
+n
i
/2+m
i
= 2, which are the ones given
in Eqs. (5) and (6). To next order in momenta, we may include tree graphs
with any number of vertices with d
i
+n
i
/2+m
i
= 2 and just one vertex with
d
i
+n
i
/2+m
i
= 3 (such as the so-called -term). To next order, we include
any number of vertices with d
i
+ n
i
/2 + m
i
= 2, plus either a single loop,
or a single vertex with d
i
+n
i
/2 +m
i
= 4 which provides a counterterm for
the innity in the loop graph, or two vertices with d
i
+n
i
/2 +m
i
= 3. And
so on. Thus one can generate a power series in momenta and m

, in which
only a few new constants need to be introduced at each new order. As an
21
I thought it appropriate to publish this in a festschrift for Julian Schwinger; see
footnote 1.
10
explicit example of this procedure, I calculated the one-loop corrections to
pionpion scattering in the limit of zero pion mass, and of course I found
the sort of corrections required to this order by unitarity.
22
But even if this procedure gives well-dened nite results, how do we
know they are true? It would be extraordinarily dicult to justify any cal-
culation involving loop graphs using current algebra. For me in 1979, the
answer involved a radical reconsideration of the nature of quantum eld the-
ory. From its beginning in the late 1920s, quantum eld theory had been
regarded as the application of quantum mechanics to elds that are among
the fundamental constituents of the universe rst the electromagnetic
eld, and later the electron eld and elds for other known elementary
particles. In fact, this became a working denition of an elementary particle
it is a particle with its own eld. But for years in teaching courses on
quantum eld theory I had emphasized that the description of nature by
quantum eld theories is inevitable, at least in theories with a nite number
of particle types, once one assumes the principles of relativity and quantum
mechanics, plus the cluster decomposition principle, which requires that
distant experiments have uncorrelated results. So I began to think that al-
though specic quantum eld theories may have a content that goes beyond
these general principles, quantum eld theory itself does not. I oered this
in my 1979 paper as what Arthur Wightman would call a folk theorem: if
one writes down the most general possible Lagrangian, including all terms
consistent with assumed symmetry principles, and then calculates matrix
elements with this Lagrangian to any given order of perturbation theory,
the result will simply be the most general possible S-matrix consistent with
perturbative unitarity, analyticity, cluster decomposition, and the assumed
symmetry properties. So current algebra wasnt needed.
There was an interesting irony in this. I had been at Berkeley from
1959 to 1966, when Georey Chew and his collaborators were elaborating a
program for calculating S-matrix elements for strong interaction processes
by the use of unitarity, analyticity, and Lorentz invariance, without reference
to quantum eld theory. I found it an attractive philosophy, because it relied
only on a minimum of principles, all well established. Unfortunately, the S-
matrix theorists were never able to develop a reliable method of calculation,
so I worked instead on other things, including current algebra. Now in 1979
22
Unitarity corrections to soft-pion results of current algebra had been considered earlier
by H. Schnitzer, Phys. Rev. Lett. 24, 1384 (1970); Phys. Rev. D2, 1621 (1970); L.-F.
Li and H. Pagels, Phys. Rev. Lett. 26, 1204 (1971); Phys. Rev. D5, 1509 (1972); P.
Langacker and H. Pagels, Phys. Rev. D8, 4595 (1973).
11
I realized that the assumptions of S-matrix theory, supplemented by chiral
invariance, were indeed all that are needed at low energy, but the most
convenient way of implementing these assumptions in actual calculations
was by good old quantum eld theory, which the S-matrix theorists had
hoped to supplant.
After 1979, eective eld theories were applied to strong interactions in
work by Gasser, Leutwyler, Meissner, and many other theorists. My own
contributions to this work were limited to two areas isospin violation,
and nuclear forces.
At rst in the development of chiral dynamics there had been a tacit
assumption that isotopic spin symmetry was a better approximate symme-
try than chiral SU(2) SU(2), and that the Gell-MannNeeman SU(3)
symmetry was a better approximate symmetry than chiral SU(3) SU(3).
This assumption became untenable with the calculation of quark mass ratios
from the measured pseudoscalar meson masses.
23
It turns out that the d
quark mass is almost twice the u quark mass, and the s quark mass is very
much larger than either. As a consequence of the inequality of d and u quark
masses, chiral SU(2) SU(2) is broken in the Lagrangian of quantum chro-
modynamics not only by the fourth component of a chiral four-vector, as in
(6), but also by the third component of a dierent chiral four-vector pro-
portional to m
u
m
d
(whose fourth component is a pseudoscalar). There
is no function of the pion eld alone, without derivatives, with the latter
transformation property, which is why pionpion scattering and the pion
masses are described by (6) and the rst term in (5) in leading order, with
no isospin breaking aside of course from that due to electromagnetism. But
there are non-derivative corrections to pionnucleon interactions,
24
which
at momenta of order m

are suppressed relative to the derivative coupling

terms in (5) by just one factor of m

or momenta:

L
e
=
A
2
_
1
2
/F
2

1 +
2
/F
2

_

NN
B
_

Nt
3
N
2
F
2

_

3
1 +
2
/F
2

_

N

t N
_
23
S. Weinberg, contribution to a festschrift for I. I. Rabi, Trans. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 38,
185 (1977).
24
S. Weinberg, in Chiral Dynamics: Theory and Experiment Proceedings of the Work-
shop Held at MIT, July 1994 (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1995). The terms in Eq. (13) that
are odd in the pion eld are given in Section 19.5 of S. Weinberg, The Quantum Theory
of Fields, Vol. II (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
12

iC
1 +
2
/F
2

N
5

tN

iD
3
1 +
2
/F
2

N
5
N , (13)
where A and C are proportional to m
u
+m
d
, and B and D are proportional
to m
u
m
d
, with B 2.5 MeV. The A and B terms contribute isospin
conserving and violating terms to the so-called -term in pion nucleon scat-
tering.
My work on nuclear forces began one day in 1990 while I was lecturing
to a graduate class at Texas. I derived Eq. (12) for the class, and showed
how the interactions in the leading tree graphs with d
i
+n
i
/2+m
i
= 2 were
just those given here in Eqs. (5) and (6). Then, while I was standing at the
blackboard, it suddenly occurred to me that there was one other term with
d
i
+ n
i
/2 + m
i
= 2 that I had never previously considered: an interaction
with no factors of pion mass and no derivatives (and hence, according to chi-
ral symmetry, no pions), but four nucleon elds that is, a sum of Fermi
interactions (

NN)(

N

N), with any matrices and

allowed by Lorentz
invariance, parity conservation, and isospin conservation. This is just the
sort of hard core nucleonnucleon interaction that nuclear theorists had
long known has to be added to the pion-exchange term in theories of nuclear
force. But there is a complication in graphs for nucleonnucleon scatter-
ing at low energy, two-nucleon intermediate states make a large contribution
that invalidates the sort of power-counting that justies the use of the eec-
tive Lagrangian (5), (6) in processes involving only pions, or one low-energy
nucleon plus pions. So it is necessary to apply the eective Lagrangian,
including the terms (

NN)(

N

N) along with the terms (5) and (6), to

the two-nucleon irreducible nucleonnucleon potential, rather than directly
to the scattering amplitude.
25
This program was initially carried further
by Ordo nez, van Kolck, Friar, and their collaborators,
26
and eventually by
several others.
The advent of eective eld theories generated changes in point of view
and suggested new techniques of calculation that propagated out to numer-
25
S. Weinberg, Phys. Lett. B251, 288 (1990); Nucl. Phys. B363, 3 (1991); Phys. Lett.
B295, 114 (1992).
26
C. Ordo nez and U. van Kolck, Phys. Lett. B291, 459 (1992); C. Ordo nez. L. Ray,
and U. van Kolck, Phys. Rev. Lett. 72, 1982 (1994); U. van Kolck, Phys. Rev. C49,
2932 (1994); U. van Kolck, J. Friar, and T. Goldman, Phys. Lett. B 371, 169 (1996); C.
Ordo nez, L. Ray, and U. van Kolck, Phys. Rev. C 53, 2086 (1996); C. J. Friar, Few-Body
Systems Suppl. 99, 1 (1996).
13
ous areas of physics, some quite far removed from particle physics. Notable
here is the use of the power-counting arguments of eective eld theory to
justify the approximations made in the BCS theory of superconductivity.
27
Instead of counting powers of small momenta, one must count powers of
the departures of momenta from the Fermi surface. Also, general features
of theories of ination have been claried by re-casting these theories as
eective eld theories of the inaton and gravitational elds.
28
Perhaps the most important lesson from chiral dynamics was that we
should keep an open mind about renormalizability. The renormalizable
Standard Model of elementary particles may itself be just the rst term
in an eective eld theory that contains every possible interaction allowed
by Lorentz invariance and the SU(3) SU(2) U(1) gauge symmetry, only
with the non-renormalizable terms suppressed by negative powers of some
very large mass M, just as the terms in chiral dynamics with more deriva-
tives than in Eq. (5) are suppressed by negative powers of 2F

m
N
. One
indication that there is a large mass scale in some theory underlying the
Standard Model is the well-known fact that the three (suitably normalized)
running gauge couplings of SU(3)SU(2)U(1) become equal at an energy
of the order of 10
15
GeV (or, if supersymmetry is assumed, 2 10
16
GeV,
with better convergence of the couplings.)
In 1979 papers by Frank Wilczek and Tony Zee
29
and me
30
independently
pointed out that, while the renormalizable terms of the Standard Model
cannot violate baryon or lepton conservation,
31
this is not true of the higher
27
G. Benfatto and G. Gallavotti, J. Stat. Phys. 59, 541 (1990); Phys. Rev. 42, 9967
(1990); J. Feldman and E. Trubowitz, Helv. Phys. Acta 63, 157 (1990); 64, 213 (1991);
65, 679 (1992); R. Shankar, Physica A177, 530 (1991); Rev. Mod. Phys. 66, 129 (1993);
J. Polchinski, in Recent Developments in Particle Theory, Proceedings of the 1992 TASI,
eds. J. Harvey and J. Polchinski (World Scientic, Singapore, 1993); S. Weinberg, Nucl.
Phys. B413, 567 (1994).
28
C. Cheung, P. Creminilli, A. L. Fitzpatrick, J. Kaplan, and L. Senatore, J. High
Energy Physics 0803, 014 (2008); S. Weinberg, Phys. Rev. D 73, 123541 (2008).
29
F. Wilczek and A. Zee, Phys. Rev. Lett. 43, 1571 (1979).
30
S. Weinberg, Phys. Rev. Lett. 43, 1566 (1979).
31
This is not true if the eective theory contains elds for the squarks and sleptons of
supersymmetry. However, there are no renormalizable baryon or lepton violating terms
in split supersymmetry theories, in which the squarks and sleptons are superheavy,
and only the gauginos and perhaps higgsinos survive to ordinary energies; see N. Arkani-
Hamed and S. Dimopoulos, JHEP 0506, 073 (2005); G. F. Giudice and A. Romanino,
Nucl. Phys. B 699, 65 (2004); N. Arkani-Hamed, S. Dimopoulos, G. F. Giudice, and A.
Romanino, Nucl. Phys. B 709, 3 (2005); A. Delgado and G. F. Giudice, Phys. Lett.
B627, 155 (2005).
14
non-renormalizable terms. In particular, four-fermion terms can generate a
proton decay into antileptons, though not into leptons, with an amplitude
suppressed on dimensional grounds by a factor M
2
. The conservation of
baryon and lepton number in observed physical processes thus may be an
accident, an artifact of the necessary simplicity of the leading renormalizable
SU(3) SU(2) U(1)-invariant interactions. I also noted at the same time
that interactions between a pair of lepton doublets and a pair of scalar
doublets can generate a neutrino mass, which is suppressed only by a factor
M
1
, and that therefore with a reasonable estimate of M could produce
observable neutrino oscillations. The subsequent conrmation of neutrino
oscillations lends support to the view of the Standard Model as an eective
eld theory, with M somewhere in the neighborhood of 10
16
GeV.
Of course, these non-renormalizable terms can be (and in fact, had been)
generated in various renormalizable grand-unied theories by integrating
out the heavy particles in these theories. Some calculations in the result-
ing theories can be assisted by treating them as eective eld theories.
32
But the important point is that the existence of suppressed baryon- and
lepton-nonconserving terms, and some of their detailed properties, should
be expected on much more general grounds, even if the underlying theory
is not a quantum eld theory at all. Indeed, from the 1980s on, it has been
increasingly popular to suppose that the theory underlying the Standard
Model as well as general relativity is a string theory.
Which brings me to gravitation. Just as we have learned to live with the
fact that there is no renormalizable theory of pion elds that is invariant un-
der the chiral transformation (7), so also we should not despair of applying
quantum eld theory to gravitation just because there is no renormaliz-
able theory of the metric tensor that is invariant under general coordinate
transformations. It increasingly seems apparent that the EinsteinHilbert
Lagrangian

gR is just the least suppressed term in the Lagrangian of an
eective eld theory containing every possible generally covariant function
of the metric and its derivatives. The application of this point of view to
long range properties of gravitation has been most thoroughly developed
32
The eective eld theories derived by integrating out heavy particles had been con-
sidered by T. Appelquist and J. Carrazone, Phys. Rev. D11, 2856 (1975). In 1980, in a
paper titled Eective Gauge Theories, I used the techniques of eective eld theory to
evaluate the eects of integrating out the heavy gauge bosons in grand unied theories on
the initial conditions for the running of the gauge couplings down to accessible energies:
S. Weinberg, Phys. Lett. 91B, 51 (1980).
15
by John Donoghue and his collaborators.
33
One consequence of viewing
the EinsteinHilbert Lagrangian as one term in an eective eld theory is
that any theorem based on conventional general relativity, which declares
that under certain initial conditions future singularities are inevitable, must
be reinterpreted to mean that under these conditions higher terms in the
eective action become important.
Of course, there is a problem the eective theory of gravitation cannot
be used at very high energies, say of the order of the Planck mass, no more
than chiral dynamics can be used above a momentum of order 2F

1
GeV. For purposes of the subsequent discussion, it is useful to express this
problem in terms of the Wilsonian renormalization group. The eective
action for gravitation takes the form
I
e
=
_
d
4
x
_
Detg
_
f
0
() +f
1
()R
+f
2a
()R
2
+f
2b
()R

+f
3a
()R
3
+. . .
_
, (14)
where here is the ultraviolet cuto, and the f
n
() are coupling parame-
ters with a cuto dependence chosen so that physical quantities are cuto-
independent. We can replace these coupling parameters with dimensionless
parameters g
n
():
g
0

4
f
0
; g
1

2
f
1
; g
2a
f
2a
;
g
2b
f
2b
; g
3a

2
f
3a
; . . . . (15)
Because dimensionless, these parameters must satisfy a renormalization
group equation of the form

d
d
g
n
() =
n
_
g()
_
. (16)
In perturbation theory, all but a nite number of the g
n
() go to innity
as , which if true would rule out the use of this theory to calculate
33
J. F. Donoghue, Phys. Rev. D50, 3874 (1884); Phys. Lett. 72, 2996 (1994); lectures
presented at the Advanced School on Eective Field Theories (Almunecar, Spain, June
1995), gr-qc/9512024; J. F. Donoghue, B. R. Holstein, B.Garbrecth, and T.Konstandin,
Phys. Lett. B529, 132 (2002); N. E. J. Bjerrum-Bohr, J. F. Donoghue, and B. R. Holstein,
Phys. Rev. D68, 084005 (2003).
16
anything at very high energy. There are even examples, like the Landau pole
in quantum electrodynamics and the phenomenon of triviality in scalar
eld theories, in which the couplings blow up at a nite value of .
It is usually assumed that this explosion of the dimensionless couplings
at high energy is irrelevant in the theory of gravitation, just as it is irrelevant
in chiral dynamics. In chiral dynamics, it is understood that at energies of
order 2F

m
N
, the appropriate degrees of freedom are no longer pion
and nucleon elds, but rather quark and gluon elds. In the same way, it is
usually assumed that in the quantum theory of gravitation, when reaches
some very high energy, of the order of 10
15
to 10
18
GeV, the appropriate
degrees of freedom are no longer the metric and the Standard Model elds,
but something very dierent, perhaps strings.
But maybe not. It is just possible that the appropriate degrees of free-
dom at all energies are the metric and matter elds, including those of the
Standard Model. The dimensionless couplings can be protected from blow-
ing up if they are attracted to a nite value g
n
. This is known as asymptotic
safety.
34
Quantum chromodynamics provides an example of asymptotic safety,
but one in which the theory at high energies is not only safe from exploding
couplings, but also free. In the more general case of asymptotic safety, the
high energy limit g
n
is nite, but not commonly zero.
For asymptotic safety to be possible, it is necessary that all the beta
functions should vanish at g
n
:

n
(g

) = 0 . (17)
It is also necessary that the physical couplings should be on a trajectory
that is attracted to g
n
. The number of independent parameters in such
a theory equals the dimensionality of the surface, known as the ultraviolet
critical surface, formed by all the trajectories that are attracted to the xed
point. This dimensionality had better be nite, if the theory is to have
any predictive power at high energy. For an asymptotically safe theory
with a nite-dimensional ultraviolet critical surface, the requirement that
couplings lie on this surface plays much the same role as the requirment
of renormalizability in quantum chromodynamics it provides a rational
basis for limiting the complexity of the theory.
This dimensionality of the ultraviolet critical surface can be expressed
in terms of the behavior of
n
(g) for g near the xed point g

. Barring
34
This was rst proposed in my 1976 Erice lectures; see footnote 20.
17
unexpected singularities, in this case we have

n
(g)

m
B
nm
(g
m
g
m
) , B
nm

_

n
(g)
g
m
_

. (18)
The solution of Eq. (16) for g near g

is then
g
n
() g
n
+

i
u
in

i
, (19)
where
i
and u
in
are the eigenvalues and suitably normalized eigenvectors
of B
nm
:

m
B
nm
u
im
=
i
u
in
. (20)
Because B
nm
is real but not symmetric, the eigenvalues are either real, or
come in pairs of complex conjugates. The dimensionality of the ultraviolet
critical surface is therefore equal to the number of eigenvalues of B
nm
with
negative real part. The condition that the couplings lie on this surface can be
regarded as a generalization of the condition that quantum chromodynamics,
if it were a fundamental and not merely an eective eld theory, would have
to involve only renormalizable couplings.
It may seem unlikely that an innite matrix like B
nm
should have only
a nite number of eigenvalues with negative real part, but in fact examples
of this are quite common. As we learned from the WilsonFisher theory
of critical phenomena, when a substance undergoes a second-order phase
transition, its parameters are subject to a renormalization group equation
that has a xed point, with a single infrared-repulsive direction, so that
adjustment of a single parameter such as the temperature or the pressure
can put the parameters of the theory on an infrared attractive surface of
co-dimension one, leading to long-range correlations. The single infrared-
repulsive direction is at the same time a unique ultraviolet-attractive direc-
tion, so the ultraviolet critical surface in such a theory is a one-dimensional
curve. Of course, the parameters of the substance on this curve do not re-
ally approach a xed point at very short distances, because at a distance of
the order of the interparticle spacing the eective eld theory describing the
phase transition breaks down.
What about gravitation? There are indications that here too there is
a xed point, with an ultraviolet critical surface of nite dimensionality.
Fixed points have been found (of course with g
n
= 0) using dimensional
18
continuation from 2+ to 4 spacetime dimensions,
35
by a 1/N approximation
(where N is the number of added matter elds),
36
by lattice methods,
37
and
by use of the truncated exact renormalization group equation,
38
initiated
in 1998 by Martin Reuter. In the last method, which had earlier been
introduced in condensed matter physics
39
and then carried over to particle
theory,
40
one derives an exact renormalization group equation for the total
vacuum amplitude [g, ] in the presence of a background metric g

with
an infrared cuto . This is the action to be used in calculations of the
true vacuum amplitude in calculations of graphs with an ultraviolet cuto
. To have equations that can be solved, it is necessary to truncate these
renormalization group equations, writing [g, ] as a sum of just a nite
number of terms like those shown explicitly in Eq. (14), and ignoring the
fact that the beta function inevitably does not vanish for the couplings of
other terms in [g, ] that in the given truncation are assumed to vanish.
Initially only two terms were included in the truncation of [g, ] (a cos-
mological constant and the EinsteinHilbert term

gR), and a xed point
was found with two eigenvalues
i
, a pair of complex conjugates with nega-
35
S. Weinberg, in General Relativity, ed. S. W. Hawking and W. Israel (Cambridge
University Press, 1979): 700; H. Kawai, Y. Kitazawa, & M. Ninomiya, Nucl. Phys. B
404, 684 (1993); Nucl. Phys. B 467, 313 (1996); T. Aida & Y. Kitazawa, Nucl. Phys. B
401, 427 (1997); M. Niedermaier, Nucl. Phys. B 673, 131 (2003) .
36
L. Smolin, Nucl. Phys. B208, 439 (1982); R. Percacci, Phys. Rev. D 73, 041501
(2006).
37
J. Ambjrn, J. Jurkewicz, & R. Loll, Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 131301 (2004); Phys. Rev.
Lett. 95, 171301 (2005); Phys. Rev. D72, 064014 (2005); Phys. Rev. D78, 063544 (2008);
and in Approaches to Quantum Gravity, ed. D. Orti (Cambridge University Press).
38
M. Reuter, Phys. Rev. D 57, 971 (1998); D. Dou & R. Percacci, Class. Quant. Grav.
15, 3449 (1998); W. Souma, Prog. Theor. Phys. 102, 181 (1999); O. Lauscher & M.
Reuter, Phys. Rev. D 65, 025013 (2001); Class. Quant. Grav. 19. 483 (2002); M. Reuter
& F. Saueressig, Phys Rev. D 65, 065016 (2002); O. Lauscher & M. Reuter, Int. J. Mod.
Phys. A 17, 993 (2002); Phys. Rev. D 66, 025026 (2002); M. Reuter and F. Saueressig,
Phys Rev. D 66, 125001 (2002); R. Percacci & D. Perini, Phys. Rev. D 67, 081503 (2002);
Phys. Rev. D 68, 044018 (2003); D. Perini, Nucl. Phys. Proc. Suppl. C 127, 185 (2004);
D. F. Litim, Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 201301 (2004); A. Codello & R. Percacci, Phys. Rev.
Lett. 97, 221301 (2006); A. Codello, R. Percacci, & C. Rahmede, Int. J. Mod. Phys.
A23, 143 (2008); M. Reuter & F. Saueressig, 0708.1317; P. F. Machado and F. Saueressig,
Phys. Rev. D77, 124045 (2008); A. Codello, R. Percacci, & C. Rahmede, Ann. Phys. 324,
414 (2009); A. Codello & R. Percacci, 0810.0715; D. F. Litim 0810.3675; H. Gies & M. M.
Scherer, 0901.2459; D. Benedetti, P. F. Machado, & F. Saueressig, 0901.2984, 0902.4630;
M. Reuter & H. Weyer, 0903.2971.
39
F. J. Wegner and A. Houghton, Phys. Rev. A8, 401 (1973).
40
J. Polchinski, Nucl. Phys. B231, 269 (1984); C. Wetterich, Phys. Lett. B 301, 90
(1993).
19
tive real part. Then a third operator (R

or the equivalent) was added,

and a third eigenvalue was found, with
i
real and negative. This was not
encouraging. If each time that new terms were included in the truncation,
new eigenvalues appeared with negative real part, then the ultraviolet crit-
ical surface would be innite dimensional, and the theory, though free of
couplings that exploded at high energy, would lose all predictive value at
high energy.
In just the last few years calculations have been done that allow more
optimism. Codello, Percacci, and Rahmede
41
have considered a Lagrangian
containing all terms

gR
n
with n running from zero to a maximum value
n
max
, and nd that the ultraviolet critical surface has dimensionality 3 even
when n
max
exceeds 2, up to the highest value n
max
= 6 that they considered,
for which the space of coupling constants is 7-dimensional. Furthermore,
the three eigenvalues they nd with negative real part seem to converge
as n
max
increases, as shown in the following table of ultraviolet-attractive
eigenvalues:
n
max
= 2 : 1.38 2.32i 26.8
n
max
= 3 : 2.71 2.27i 2.07
n
max
= 4 : 2.86 2.45i 1.55
n
max
= 5 : 2.53 2.69i 1.78
n
max
= 6 : 2.41 2.42i 1.50
In a subsequent paper
42
they added matter elds, and again found just three
ultraviolet-attractive eigenvalues. Further, this year Benedetti, Machado,
and Saueressig
43
considered a truncation with a dierent four terms, terms
proportional to

gR
n
with n = 0, 1 and 2 and also

gC

(where
C

is the Weyl tensor) and they too nd just three ultraviolet-attractive

eigenvalues, also when matter is added. If this pattern of eigenvalues con-
tinues to hold in future calculations, it will begin to look as if there is a
quantum eld theory of gravitation that is well-dened at all energies, and
that has just three free parameters.
The natural arena for application of these ideas is in the physics of
gravitation at small distance scales and high energy specically, in the
early universe. A start in this direction has been made by Reuter and his
collaborators,
44
but much remains to be done.
41
A. Codello, R. Percacci, & C. Rahmede, Int. J. Mod. Phys. A23, 143 (2008)
42
A. Codello, R. Percacci, & C. Rahmede, Ann. Phys. 324, 414 (2009)
43
D. Benedetti, P. F. Machado, & F. Saueressig, 0901.2984, 0902.4630
44
A. Bonanno and M. Reuter, Phys. Rev. D 65, 043508 (2002); Phys. Lett. B527, 9
20
I am grateful for correspondence about recent work on asymptotic safety
with D. Benedetti, D. Litim, R. Percacci, and M. Reuter, and to G. Colan-
gelo and J. Gasser for inviting me to give this talk. This material is based
in part on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant
NO. PHY-0455649 and with support from The Robert A. Welch Foundation,
Grant No. F-0014.
(2002); M. Reuter and F. Saueressig, J. Cosm. and Astropart. Phys. 09, 012 (2005).
21